This invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for sharing resources among multiple processing systems. For example, each processing system may contain an administrator processor (host processor) and an associated plurality of intelligent resources, like a printer, personal computer, or an encoder, for example, which are serviced by the associated administrator processor via a Local Area Network (LAN). In particular, this invention relates to a method and apparatus for shifting a workload from an intelligent resource (like a printer) of a first one of the processing systems to a corresponding intelligent resource or terminal (like a printer) in a second one of processing systems whenever the intelligent resource of the first processing system becomes overloaded or the associated communications network of the first processing system breaks down, for example.
In certain prior-art data processing systems, like the one shown in FIG. 1, an administrator processor utilizes a plurality of intelligent resources like W, X, Y, and Z coupled to a local area network such as Ethernet, for example, to process a certain workload. For example, one such processing system may be a system for processing documents, like checks, at a financial institution, like a bank. The intelligent resources W, X, Y, and Z shown in FIG. 1 may be as follows:
W may be a magnetic character reader; PA1 X may be a data entry workstation; PA1 Y may be an error correction station; and PA1 Z may be a MICR (magnetic ink) encoder.
Naturally, there may be more than one of these W, X, Y, and Z intelligent resources associated with a particular administrator processor. Also, at a processing center, there may be several such processing systems like the one shown in FIG. 1. While each data processing system may have some redundancy built into it and may have some reserve processing capacity, very often one processing system may become overburdened or elements in the system may become incapacitated while another processing system or elements in another processing system may be idle.
A prior art solution to the problem mentioned in the previous paragraph is to configure all the processing systems on the same LAN; however, the problem with this solution is that the bandwidth of the LAN must be shared among all the processing systems. As the number of processing systems on the LAN increases, the sum of the communication bandwidths for the individual processing systems will exceed the useful available bandwidth on the LAN; consequently, the individual processing systems will experience performance degredation.